An ongoing quest for quality (now hiring!)

“Better”. That’s how we started things. More specifically, we started with Dieter Rams’s design ethos: “Less, but better.” With this simple idea we started our design business six years ago – with a specific goal: to do better. This is what we went for in our first jobs, but over the years we couldn’t find anymore where we worked.

”Better”, is why we went through the lengths to create our own tooling to create HTML prototypes: Bedrock.

It’s why we work to become a master of our tools, to the point of becoming an expert and giving workshops, in the case of Figma.

In our new job ad we say you need to be a master of your tools. It’s not that we are tools-obsessed. The reason that you need to become a master is so that can you can do the work in a way that leaves enough mental space to think about making the design itself better. To solve the design problem at hand.

I am learning Blender at the moment and I am in this beginner phase, where the work is not what I want it to be. There is this gap between what I am creating and what I want to create. I struggle and I have to look up things all the time. But when I work in my specialty area – UI design – that gap is not there*. I can think and then I can create. We’re looking for someone who has also reached this phase of skill.

We don’t really care which tool it is that you can do this in either. Xavier has a penchant for Sketch and I love Figma. Over the years different tools have gone and stayed.

When we observe a gap in our design work, we work to fill it. We created a custom icon set last year in October called Mono Icons. Because we believe we need the vector and content control to deliver the quality we desire. We want to draw the shape that we want and not resort to the best available option from a set.

Quality is why we learned to code when we were stuck expressing out ideas in a static image editor. It’s why we have invested in learning about the design related part of the major Javascript frameworks. We’ve worked as coding designers within the major frameworks — Vue, React, Svelte, Ember and Angular — to find out how we can contribute as designers in the environment our work ends up in.

We’re still designers at heart though, and Javascript front-end developer is a speciality in its own right. But a JS dev would be the first person we would pair with to make our app dreams a reality. With a prototype and design in hand, and enough HTML/CSS skills, we can help dev teams realize their design dreams.

Responding to our job ad and our expectations, some people are like… good luck finding the unicorn designer who can do all of those things?

But I think, as a team we have proved multiple times that we can find the right people to do this with us. It means that we grow a bit slower than others. But that’s alright. 

Ready to join us? Check out our position for senior UX/UI designer and write to us.

*Unless Figma just pushed an update, and the learning process continues ;)